Minding the Gap: Ethnic, gender and social class differences in attainment at 16, 1988‐95

Abstract

This article presents analyses of attainment variations for ® ve cohorts of school leavers between 1988 and 1995. Social class, ethnicity and gender variations in educational attainment at 16 are examined using data from over 80,000 young people in England and Wales. This is the only representative data set that allows analyses of educational variations in England and Wales across social class, ethnic and gender groups simultaneously. The preliminary analyses showed an underrepresentation of some ethnic and lower social class groups in the independent education sector. The attainment analyses thereafter are for state school pupils only. Between 1988 and 1995, attainment differences relating to social class, ethnicity and gender are all seen to increase. In terms of the percentages leaving compulsory schooling with ® ve or more high grade passes (grade A*± C at General Certi® cate of Secondary Education), the social class gap of 50 percentage points widened to 56 percentage points, the ethnicity gap from 14 to 20 percentage points and the gender gap from 5 to 10 percentage points. The uneven improvement in educational attainment across ethnic, social class and gender groups is a cause for concern. For certain subgroups there appears to be little or no improvement over the 8 years. These ® ndings relate to a period of considerable political intervention within the British compulsory education system. They suggest that policies focused on raising educational standards may be at variance with the aim of reducing educational inequality.

Can achievement differentials be explained by social class alone?

“…This benchmark largely reflects its past use as a means of entry to the professions and higher education, where it has usually been the cut-off point for acceptance (see Drew et al, 1992). British work on minority ethnic educational attainment to date has often been limited by the difficulty of controlling adequately for social background because of the small number of minority ethnic pupils in available datasets (see for example Drew and Gray, 1990;Drew, 1995;Demack et al, 2000). This article goes some way towards addressing these limitations by drawing on a combined dataset of the Youth Cohort Study surveys from 1991 to 2000.…”

“…How the effect of social class will vary by ethnicity is less clear. Little British work on black and minority ethnic educational attainment to date has been able to control adequately for social background due to the small numbers of minority ethnic students in nationally representative datasets (see for example Drew and Gray, 1990;Drew, 1995;Demack et al, 2000;Owen et al, 2000). Some black and minority ethnic groups are heavily concentrated towards the bottom of the class structure; it might therefore be expected that many of the inequalities in performance can be explained by the differential distributions of the major ethnic groups across the occupational framework.…”

Who Aspires to a Science Career? A comparison of survey responses from primary and secondary school students

“…However, once attainment is taken into consideration, the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) becomes negligible (Smith & Gorard, 2011). Nevertheless, the intractable nature of the links between SES and attainment (Demack, Drew, & Grimsley, 2000;Homer, Ryder, & Donnelly, 2013) highlights the way in which post-compulsory participation in science is patterned by social class. Post-compulsory participation is also patterned by ethnicity (e.g.…”

From Preschool to University. Analysis of the School Careers of Inmigrants in France

“…la situación en este último grupo de países es especialmente preocupante ya que uno de cada cuatro estudiantes inmigrantes no alcanza el nivel mínimo de conocimientos en matemáticas y lectura definidos por la ocDe, e incluso un 0 por 00 podría llegar a no adquirir nunca las capacidades más esenciales que se necesitan para solucionar problemas básicos de carácter diario (stanat y christensen, 2006: 54). Además de estas comparaciones internacionales, algunos estudios de caso han demostrado que los inmigrantes en las sociedades avanzadas presentan un bajo rendimiento escolar, trayectorias escolares menos exitosas, una menor probabilidad de transición a la educación superior y tasas de abandono escolar más altas que las de los nativos (Driesen y Geert, 2000;Demack et al, 2000;riphahn, 200;Baker et al, 985;Kristen, 2000). las familias extranjeras, como las de inmigrantes naturalizados en la sociedad de acogida, pueden tener poderosas razones para explicar su peor rendimiento, algo que puede deberse a los costes asociados al proceso migratorio: transporte y reunificación familiar, pérdida de capital humano específico del país de origen, etc.…”